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Past Events

Past EventsTuesday, March 8

Gaza Blues and Beyond

Etgar KeretSamir El-youssef Linda Grant

With no common political agenda, nor even a desire to talk politics together, Israeli author Etgar Keret and Palestinian author Samir El-youssef have forged a remarkable literary collaboration. In Gaza Blues (2004), a book of short stories and a novella, they place their fictional voices alongside one another in an exploration of various aspects of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

With Linda Grant, these two writers discussed their aim of making the “conflict more complex… as human life is complex”, rather than repeating the old rhetoric, and explored El-youssef’s desire to create a new literature for an Arab audience.

Etgar Keret, born in Tel Aviv in 1967, is one of Israel’s bestselling authors. His latest book, The Nimrod Flip-Out, is published in March 2005.

Samir El-youssef was born in the Lebanon in 1965 and now lives in London. He contributes regularly to major Arab periodicals and London-based Arabic news services.

Linda Grant’s When I Lived in Modern Times (2000) won the Orange Prize for Fiction.